Goodbye Windows: China to create home-grown OS based on Ubuntu

Ubuntu maker Canonical has signed a deal with the Chinese government to create a new version of Ubuntu. For China, this is widely seen as an attempt "to wean its IT sector off Western software in favour of more home-grown alternatives," the BBC reported.

In other words, it's an attempt to move from Windows to Linux. According to NetMarketshare statistics, Windows has 91.62 percent market share on the desktop in China, compared to 1.21 percent for Linux. The other 7.17 percent is OS X.

China is developing a new reference architecture for operating systems, based on Ubuntu. The Chinese version of Ubuntu—called Ubuntu Kylin—will be released next month in conjunction with Ubuntu's regular release cycle.

"Ubuntu Kylin goes beyond language localisation and includes features and applications that cater for the Chinese market," Canonical said in its announcement. "In the 13.04 release, Chinese input methods and Chinese calendars are supported, there is a new weather indicator, and users can quickly search across the most popular Chinese music services from the Dash. Future releases will include integration with Baidu maps and leading shopping service Taobao, payment processing for Chinese banks, and real-time train and flight information. The Ubuntu Kylin team is cooperating with WPS, the most popular office suite in China, and is creating photo editing and system management tools which could be incorporated into other flavours of Ubuntu worldwide."

This won't just be a desktop operating system. Canonical said "future work will extend beyond the desktop to other platforms" such as servers, tablets, and phones. To work on the software, Canonical and China have set up a joint lab in Beijing to host engineers from Canonical and Chinese government agencies.

166 Reader Comments

but you have to admit that they have been managing their growth and economy better than the West has recently.

Nope. They have a horrendous housing bubble. It just didn't burst at the same time the US' did. A superficial view of economies is misleading... A few years ago, people were shouting from the rooftops that the Euro was going to replace the US Dollar as the popular global reserve currency. Trumpeting how much better the EU's economy was than the US'.

China is doing well in-spite of its leadership. And the governance model is inherently unstable... When the US economy crashed, nobody expected it to cause a popular revolt that overthrows the government, but that's exactly the threat China is under, and their survival depends on the current unsustainable growth never stopping.

This sounds like a good idea for them, and could well give Linux a leg up in other markets.

For all the people saying "Oh noes, they'll have all these back doors and will allow rampant piracy and it's China so it must be bad...", try thinking of the positives occasionally.

This potentially gets China off a bad Windows habit. More than that, it reduces reliance on a US firm that is required by law to help the US government with its spying efforts. Chinese control over a quasi-Chinese operating system at least provides China with some sovereign power over what goes into that OS - at the moment, they have no idea what back-doors have been baked into Windows.

It also provides an opportunity to firewall the OS from state-sponsored attack. Not that the West would do anything like that of course...

There are all sorts of benefits other than the automatic assumption that "this gives the government more ability to spy on its own people". Those of us in the West have seen our own governments create all sorts of new ways to spy on their own people, from the Patriot Act to warrantless collection of network data and reading of emails. China does not have a monopoly on wanting to control its own people, it just happens to make for a great fall-guy as it is more overt in most instances. And the Western press is largely happy to keep things that way, without looking too deeply at the reality behind the spin.

They're fairly core features in Linux; it doesn't matter how barebones you go, you'll have SSH.

Um, what? No. In fact, if you install Ubuntu Server from a standard medium, you won't have SSH unless you explicitly check a box that's off by default. (Which pretty much everybody does, but the point remains, SSH is off by default.)

IIRC (?), that check-box is about installing an ssh-server, you still get an ssh-client, regardless.

Is it possible to force people to use software when they are resistant. China has had success in creating its own hardware solutions, like China Blue HD, but software is a different matter. The Government will need to develop exceptional software, inspirational education, compatible hardware, fantastic marketing and astounding financial incentives.Coordinating this effort while at the same time accommodating the rapid changes of the information technology field and deflecting interference of self-interested foreign stakeholders sounds like an impossible twenty year plan.

but you have to admit that they have been managing their growth and economy better than the West has recently.

Nope. They have a horrendous housing bubble. It just didn't burst at the same time the US' did. A superficial view of economies is misleading... A few years ago, people were shouting from the rooftops that the Euro was going to replace the US Dollar as the popular global reserve currency. Trumpeting how much better the EU's economy was than the US'.

China is doing well in-spite of its leadership. And the governance model is inherently unstable... When the US economy crashed, nobody expected it to cause a popular revolt that overthrows the government, but that's exactly the threat China is under, and their survival depends on the current unsustainable growth never stopping.

Not really, there was a speculative property bubble in the cities - and there's still lots of empty offices but they are filling up as the economy continues to grow at around 10 per cent - but much more importantly household saving is in large surplus, as opposed to the net (mortgage) debt in the West, so the banks all have a very health balance sheet, obviously in contrast to the banking sector crisis over here.

Add to that the truly massive state savings and China was able to implement a stimulus package which kept things going pretty much okay while everyone absorbed the shock of the Western downturn. And China still has lots of cash on hand, so much that it could afford to do something like 10 more similar stimulus packages and maintain healthy level of credit.

Everyone expected China to be hit hard by the Western financial crisis as it was believed that China was too dependent on export to the West. But after a brief slowdown their growth rate continued almost as normal. The truth is China exports more to the rest of the Far East, India, Africa, Brazil, Russia etc than it does now to the West, so while the Western market is important to it, it's certainly not everything. China's biggest worry is all the US treasury bonds it holds as savings: it's caught in a catch 22 where it thinks they are overvalued and would like to diversify out of them (i.e., dump them), but if it does it knows there will be a currency panic on the Dollar and the actual price it will get will be far less than it paid, and the damage to the world economy will put the recent trouble in the shade.

Long term China needs to make it's currency tradeable so that it can compete with the USD as a global reserve currency, but it's not going to do that until it squeezes everything it can out of keeping it low and building up it's domestic domestic economy so it can compete in the value added markets rather than just low level manufacturing. Maybe one motivation of adopting Linux is a desire to develop a strong, home grown IT sector which can compete globally. Meanwhile, China has already entered into several bilateral currency swap deals, so while the Renminbi is not openly tradeable, several other national banks now hold it, and China can do business aboard without having to exchange through USD, and without the consummate cost that that incurs (or the consummate benefit to the US).

As I said, I don't want to adopt the Chinese system here, but from their point of view I can see why their government gets 90+ per cent approval ratings. No, it's not because they are a totalitarian dictatorship and they made everyone say they were happy, it's because the economy is growing at a breakneck rate and people can see the country developing in front of their very eyes. And the money's not going to a few Russian style oligarchs, or US style moguls: the number of billionaires in China is surprisingly low all things considered. Obviously there's a huge disparity in incomes between Shanghai and the outer provinces, but on a per province level things look a lot better than in the West.

You and I may not like their governance model, but the Confucian system (which describes it better than 'Communist' does) has been going along a lot longer than any Democracy, and it seems fairly stable in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan etc. I recommend you take a closer look at the similarities between the Chinese system - where they do actually elect people to office at all levels down to the village communes - and the Japanese system where most cabinet meetings are ceremonial and the country is effectively governed by the civil service. Partially it's just that in China the civil service is called the 'Communist Party'.

You and I may not like their governance model, but the Confucian system (which describes it better than 'Communist' does) has been going along a lot longer than any Democracy, and it seems fairly stable in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan etc. I recommend you take a closer look at the similarities between the Chinese system - where they do actually elect people to office at all levels down to the village communes - and the Japanese system where most cabinet meetings are ceremonial and the country is effectively governed by the civil service. Partially it's just that in China the civil service is called the 'Communist Party'.

Thing is, most governments are actually run this way in reality. If you look at the actual way that the US government really works, the bureaucracy and the judiciary are what really run things and try to insulate the morons at the top from actual important decisions as much as possible.

So whatever happened to Red Flag Linux? Why didn't that make more impact in China, and why would Ubuntu do better? Is the goal just to switch from RH to Ubuntu as the "parent" distro?

I interpreted this story to at least imply that this would also include the new Unbutu Phone OS, which would give Unbutu a HUGE leg up in the Chinese market, which, in turn, would also trickle out to the West or at least give Canonical enough cash to finance a serious play for the West.

If China is so great why don't they just create their own OS from ground up versus using as Linux? Surely with all their hackers, and copying strengths from all present-day OS's, they ought to be able to create the ultimate Chinese OS!

Now whether anyone would want to use it? But they can just mandate it's use!

I'm sure that the most important consideration for China is that they can see all of the source code, and can assure themselves that the Chinese government isn't running whatever back doors the NSA has arranged to be inserted into Windows. Remember, for all the hype about Chinese hackers, some of the most aggressive state-backed "cyber warfare" has been launched by the USA (to sabotage the Iranian nuclear fuel enrichment program).

This seems to be a common misconception, as you're the second commenter to mention it.

Most large governments *already* get access to Windows and Office source code. This includes the US government, and it also includes the Chinese government.

Note also that source code, by itself, does not guarantee the security of the system. Even compiling the source code yourself does not guarantee the security of the system. See Brian Kernighan's famous essay, "Reflections on Trusting Trust."

The problem is not Microsoft, is Chinese authorities. Microsoft just happens to be the biggest software vendor that complaints. Do you think all those Adobe products in China are licensed? How about all other software? The point is that all software in China is pirated because their government does not care one bit since most of this software's are not chinese made. Now if its software developed in China, then their crack down on pirated software because it hurts their own interests.

Wait a minute ... what do you want the government to do? Send police to everybody's homes & businesses to check for pirated copies of Windows? Think on that a minute. We periodically get articles here about the U.S. Government intervening in what should be private business matters and everybody goes in a tizzy about taxpayers subsidizing big business.

You really have to rethink the scale of China. They have 1.2B people -- imagine the U.S. with 4 times the population. Now imagine the same amount of government workers trying to enforce laws. Now imagine 99% of the population not paying income taxes (the threshold is high + the economy runs on cash). This is why there is so much corruption and ignoring the laws. The existing funding & government apparatus barely can keep up with the core issues of food, air, water and energy ... they are not going to worry about software piracy.

As open as anything can be in China. Economic freedom and political freedom aren't EXACTLY the same thing, but you can't really have one without the other, as the Chinese government is finding out.

I'm hardly an expert on China, but my impression over the last few years, is that the Chinese gov't is, at this point, trying more to steer the path to political freedom (and perhaps slow it down a bit) more than it is trying to prevent it.

Can exposure to Open Source software and it's very Western based core ideas of freedom and democratic principle REALLY work to disadvantage the Chinese people in the long run? Personally, I don't think so.

I agree with this fully, economic freedom will breed the desire for political freedom. One major failure of democracy that the western media, hence the western public mindset, has not touched upon is the Epic failure of democracy in countries that are not economically, socially and education level wise ready to have a true democratic system of government. Take Philippines, Indonesia, Singapore, most of the Caribbean countries, most of Latin America as good examples.

It took the USA over a century to get their political system to where it is today and a lot of US citizens have a lot of complains about it even today. However the US wants to impose this system globally without the slow march towards maturity that they have enjoyed.

The conspiracy theory for someone like me who has lived and traveled extensively across the globe is that it is in the interest of the western powers to keep strife alive in supplier countries in order to enable the continuation of "colonial exploitation." This has come in form of cheap labor, cheap raw materials, etc, of which if those supplier countries were strong and stable enough internally could demand higher prices.

It is only recently that a supplier country has become strong enough (China) to push back. If you look at Indonesia who has supplied the West with oil and other key resources, it is still in a mess and growth has not occurred nor is Indonesia capable of standing up for its own (corrupted and selfish leaders with US backing is a whole other topic in this regard) and Indonesia had a head start of a few decades ahead of China. If a democratic system works without an established middle class, Indonesia is a great case study of how it failed, while China is a great case study of why not to become democratic before economic stability.

I also notice that a lot of people claiming China is restrictive, etc., has never actually been to China well in most cases, never left their little town in the US. Yes China is restrictive in the laws compared to the US but the US has also in many cases ignored those same laws that they claim to hold dear when it was inconvenient. I would argue this makes China the lesser hypocrite.

Lastly if you actually been to the developed cities in China, one would probably be saying, damn this makes New York City look like a backwater town and the locals that you interact with, you'd be hard press to find a real communist there, frankly China is more capitalistic these days than New Yorkers are.

But seems all you guys can do is recycle really tired negative stereotypes and question the ethics of Canonical as if this would make them some kind of toadies of the wicked, evil Chinese government and lead to repression rather than giving people useful tools.

Mao killed more people than anyone else in the history of mankind, and the Chinese government is quite repressive and unfriendly. Thus people in the west are naturally suspicious of it, and with good reason. We don't trust our own governments; what makes you think we'd trust yours?

I agree with this fully, economic freedom will breed the desire for political freedom. One major failure of democracy that the western media, hence the western public mindset, has not touched upon is the Epic failure of democracy in countries that are not economically, socially and education level wise ready to have a true democratic system of government. Take Philippines, Indonesia, Singapore, most of the Caribbean countries, most of Latin America as good examples.

One of the major failures of people who are racist, ethnocentric morons is that they believe stuff like this.

The United States has been a democratic republic for over two centuries; the early American colonists had a CONSIDERABLY lower level of material wealth than people in most modern-day countries, including many third world countries. All of Latin America is considerably wealthier than the US was in 1788. Any argument based on them not being "economically ready" is just nonsense.

Likewise, the average American at that time had a limited education at best. And yet, America is the world's oldest democracy.

Are you saying that Americans are just better than everyone else?

Japan became a democracy after the second world war, and was fully democratized within a decade. Taiwan became a democracy in 1991, South Korea in 1987. There is nothing fundamentally different about Singapore; the idea that it is "not ready" to be a democracy is pure nonsense.

There's nothing about these countries that makes them "not ready" for democracy. China or Russia could be democracies tommorrow if they really wanted to; likewise, most of South America could be as well. India has democracy despite being poor as dirt; so do several countries in southern africa, including South Africa.

There are places (much of Africa and the Middle East) where the idea of pluralism is very foreign to them, and one can argue that trying to impose democracy on such societies is doomed to fail... but it is far from clear that this is really so, given the rapid transformation of many societies into democracies in some parts of the world. Heck, India had huge problems with this, and yet they're a democracy.

Quote:

The conspiracy theory for someone like me who has lived and traveled extensively across the globe is that it is in the interest of the western powers to keep strife alive in supplier countries in order to enable the continuation of "colonial exploitation." This has come in form of cheap labor, cheap raw materials, etc, of which if those supplier countries were strong and stable enough internally could demand higher prices.

This is pure nonsense that idiots with no understanding of the world spread, and in fact is the exact opposite of reality.

The US prefers stability; instability is bad and expensive, stability is cheap and good. That's why China has gained so much money relative to, say, Africa; labor may be cheap in Africa but no one really WANTS to put infrastructure in there because of the instability. Indeed, it is the stable countries - Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea, China - which have thrived, and it was only after the Chinese stabilized that they actually began growing.

I agree with this fully, economic freedom will breed the desire for political freedom. One major failure of democracy that the western media, hence the western public mindset, has not touched upon is the Epic failure of democracy in countries that are not economically, socially and education level wise ready to have a true democratic system of government. Take Philippines, Indonesia, Singapore, most of the Caribbean countries, most of Latin America as good examples.

One of the major failures of people who are racist, ethnocentric morons is that they believe stuff like this.

The United States has been a democratic republic for over two centuries; the early American colonists had a CONSIDERABLY lower level of material wealth than people in most modern-day countries, including many third world countries. All of Latin America is considerably wealthier than the US was in 1788. Any argument based on them not being "economically ready" is just nonsense.

Likewise, the average American at that time had a limited education at best. And yet, America is the world's oldest democracy.

I'm not sure you're right on either of those points, but I think it slightly miss-frames the question to put it in terms of economy rather than culture. American democracy at birth was far removed from the popularist, media driven version that technology enables today. Add to that that the British colonists were part of a political tradition that dated back at least 150 years: Charles I was executed in 1649 by parliament who objected to him raising taxes without their consent, and was followed by a period of de facto republic under Cromwell until his death and later the establishment of a constitutional monarchy and the English Bill of Rights in 1689.

Many people in the America republic were denied the vote right up until modern times - notably non-whites and women - and the country was governed by a relatively small elite of intellectuals for many years. Even so, the new republic embarked on a campaign of ethnic killing that wiped out entire cultures and was shocking in its day, never mind to modern eyes; we would now certainly recognise it as genocide.

The question of contested 'ethnic' rights to land is very relevant to many modern, post colonial states, as their borders are often literally just lines on maps, with no concern for local claims. These deep felt, long held ethnic/ancestral claims to land are quite often a cause of tension when former colonial powers try to transition to democracy. Do you know how many people died during the partition of India? It's somewhere around half a million, maybe double that! In a matter of a few months, something like 15 million people (!!!) 'decided' move to either the new India or the new Pakistan.

I'm not sure that if America 'happened' today, they could just choose to have a nice happy democracy 'tomorrow' as you suggest.

Titanium Dragon wrote:

Are you saying that Americans are just better than everyone else?

Japan became a democracy after the second world war, and was fully democratized within a decade. Taiwan became a democracy in 1991, South Korea in 1987. There is nothing fundamentally different about Singapore; the idea that it is "not ready" to be a democracy is pure nonsense.

See my above point that the Japanese, Taiwanese and South Korean systems have far more in common with the current Chinese system than they do with Western style democracies, being part of the Confusion tradition of a strong, technocratic civil service.

China started recruiting members of the general population into the civil service via written examination in the 6th Century. Compare that to the Western political tradition.

Titanium Dragon wrote:

The US prefers stability; instability is bad and expensive, stability is cheap and good. That's why China has gained so much money relative to, say, Africa; labor may be cheap in Africa but no one really WANTS to put infrastructure in there because of the instability. Indeed, it is the stable countries - Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea, China - which have thrived, and it was only after the Chinese stabilized that they actually began growing.

China is investing massively into Africa and South America, and elsewhere. As I said previously, they now give more development loans than the World Bank, which is the Western backed institution which was set up for that purpose. China builds infrastructure so that it can more easily access the natural resources which it requires, and also funds education, health and government projects. It does this without the often damaging ideological restrictions - such as market liberalisation - that Western backed loans normally come with.

What could go wrong by allowing a dictatorship with a penchant for theft of intellectual property and surveillance to contribute code to Ubuntu?

nothing more wrong than a quasi-dictatorship with a penchant for invasion, civilian slaughter and illegal detension. (I'm talking about USA if you can't figure that one out).

It's not a dictatorship, it's a republic which uses a representative democracy, that just happens to only represent corporate and other extremely well-funded interests instead of its actual citizens. Also, you'll be hard-pressed to support the "civilian slaughter" allegation, as everyone else has been (everything seems to be baseless anecdote and hearsay). As for illegal detention and invasion, you're spot on with that, at least.

The whole "service automatically starting" bit works like this: the startup script is /etc/init.d/openssh, which is only present if openssh-server is installed. It automatically starts when the network comes up due to a similar script in /etc/network/if-up.d/openssh-server (which is slightly odd, since most services come up or down with runlevel changes by symlinking the /etc/init.d script from an /etc/rc*.d/ directory).

What could go wrong by allowing a dictatorship with a penchant for theft of intellectual property and surveillance to contribute code to Ubuntu?

nothing more wrong than a quasi-dictatorship with a penchant for invasion, civilian slaughter and illegal detension. (I'm talking about USA if you can't figure that one out).

It's not a dictatorship, it's a republic which uses a representative democracy, that just happens to only represent corporate and other extremely well-funded interests instead of its actual citizens. Also, you'll be hard-pressed to support the "civilian slaughter" allegation, as everyone else has been (everything seems to be baseless anecdote and hearsay). As for illegal detention and invasion, you're spot on with that, at least.

I see, they are only civilians when they are American.

I have a standing invitation open for people to submit non-anecdotal evidence, evidence that could actually withstand even the most basic of scrutiny. In trying myself to find some, and in asking for those making the same allegations as you to provide some, no one ever has (in fact, they usually point to five articles all referencing the same anecdotal report devoid of ANY actual evidence). I would be in no way surprised to know that the US was less discriminate than they claim to be, but the fact is, there's simply nothing remotely credible to base it on. It's not like the way the US keeps putting totalitarian regimes in power only to have to go in and remove them later; there IS solid evidence of that. Where is the credible evidence of widespread and indiscriminate slaughter of civilians? Where is there indication of more than a few tragic incidents of people losing it, or bad intel? The allegation, after all, is of indifference, not hurting the kid standing next to the target.

I think what rubs folks the wrong way, US citizens included, is that our gov't feels if there's a problem the only way to handle it is to go in cowboy-style with guns blazing and force your way down everyone's throat.

Machiavelli wrote long ago that the fastest way to piss off another country was to be seen as a foreign invader/occupier that sends military over first to "secure" the place.

The fastest way to make friends with another country was to be send business folks over to colonize a small part and open a trading post. From there, the locals will meet other folks just like them (although foreigners from another land), and they can strike up conversations as equals to form business relationships that ultimately both countries can prosper from.

The US does a good job of doing the former, and burning a shit-ton of bridges along the way (or having to rebuild and reburn the same fucking bridges over and over, ie: the middle-east, afghanistan). China has been prospering lately b/c it does the latter.

When folks get po'ed about military occupation, they want to feel that the occupying force is just indiscriminantly killing all kinds of civilians. A lot of it is propoganda, even by our own news agencies, which love to stir the pot. You're right, there are instances of nut-jobs going on a killing spree in a village. But, those are pretty isolated. 99% of the folks that we killed were killed for good reason. But, it still upsets a country when a foreign occupier shows up with unstoppable force and starts killing folks .. anyone.

You've pretty much hit it on the head right here, and it's something I've been saying for years. I'm by no means an isolationist, but one of the big problems the US has is that it steps on a lot of toes, and that's the driving force behind the main arguments (if not the real motivations; I won't pretend to know those) used by the extremists inciting violence in the middle east.

It's a time-honoured tactic to distract from problems at home by using external problems and wars. Taking the fight to Iraq was a classic example of this (combined with a bit of a vendetta; the whole "finishing what Daddy started" thing), and keeping the focus on the external threat (whether real or imagined) is part of that. No one complained about the economy going to shit, even as it started early on during the Bush regime, because the media (read: propaganda) focused on external threats and "the war on terror" (not to be confused with it's twin broth, the politically-motivated "the war on drugs" *cough*). What's truly impressive is how Bush managed to be the only wartime president to destroy an economy, when traditionally wars have caused the American economy explosive growth.

That's probably correct, but not accurate. You can turn a Linux or BSD installation into an "built-in-and-impossible-to-get-rid-of" one just as well (OSx is BSD after all). You can get modular with Windows as well (there's a special version for it, that I just don't remember the name). OSx I'll leave at that...

I think you missed what I was replying to, which was the notion that SSH (and, presumably, I dunno, openvpn? other stuff?) was somehow so magically baked into Linux that it would "always be there" no matter what an entity trying to build a distro might do.

Not baked in, just extremely core (and why you would disable SSH on a SERVER is beyond me; how do you expect to administer it? Are you seriously planning to have a monitor and keyboard hooked up to the thing?). Even if it's not included, it would be effectively impossible to prevent installing it, unless they plan to prevent admin permissions for anyone but the government, which again wouldn't work, because it's impossible to completely secure a machine against someone with physical access to it. Going with linux definitely makes it much easier to get access to the tools needed to bypass the Great Firewall, and it's extremely unlikely they'd even bother trying to remove them from the stock distro; they're simply too important, and too commonly used.

As another pointed out, I'd be even more surprised if you didn't even have an SSH client installed on that server; I get no server (on a desktop; still daft not to have it on a server) but no client would truly amaze me. It is THE standard for remote access.

BajaPaul wrote:

If China is so great why don't they just create their own OS from ground up versus using as Linux? Surely with all their hackers, and copying strengths from all present-day OS's, they ought to be able to create the ultimate Chinese OS!

Now whether anyone would want to use it? But they can just mandate it's use!

When trying to design a new and improved wheel, do you start with a square block of stone, or do you look at prior designs that worked extremely well and build on top of those? I was chewing out another idiot the other day for stubbornly trying to write a web page for his gaming group from the ground up (his excuse for listing a facebook page in his recruiting messages, when I called him out on how amateurish that is), rather than using pre-existing tools such as SMF or phpBB3 and building on top of them. It's one thing to go in and tweak things or add new things, it's another to pointless reproduce the work of others that already got things right.

That's the beautiful thing about Linux: it does so many things right, and it's extremely easy to build on top of to get it to do new things (one of many reasons it's so pervasive with embedded devices). It would be stupid and a waste of resources to try to build an OS from scratch, rather than to build on top of one that already works extremely well and has a robust ecosystem of software, services, and support already in place. Starting from scratch would not only take longer, but you'd have to develop brand new software for it; by going with Ubuntu and Linux as a base, you have a pre-made ecosystem of everything out there for linux, including the .deb package format that Ubuntu has helped solidify as very nearly becoming the de facto standard.

independent123 wrote:

sporkwitch wrote:

Big Wang wrote:

elizibar wrote:

What could go wrong by allowing a dictatorship with a penchant for theft of intellectual property and surveillance to contribute code to Ubuntu?

nothing more wrong than a quasi-dictatorship with a penchant for invasion, civilian slaughter and illegal detension. (I'm talking about USA if you can't figure that one out).

It's not a dictatorship, it's a republic which uses a representative democracy, that just happens to only represent corporate and other extremely well-funded interests instead of its actual citizens. Also, you'll be hard-pressed to support the "civilian slaughter" allegation, as everyone else has been (everything seems to be baseless anecdote and hearsay). As for illegal detention and invasion, you're spot on with that, at least.

The wikipedia numbers cite "deaths by violence" (read: not directly attributed to an american bullet fired by an american gun, in american hands), and combined figures. Nothing there references any distinction, and so is not useful in proving your argument. How many were military VS civilian? How many were killed indiscriminately vs being too close to a particular strike? The numbers aren't useful in drawing any conclusions here.

Your second link is about the vietnam war (a long, drawn-out, and largely geurilla conflict, with relatively crude weapons by today standards). Not only does the study itself, and the BLOG you cite offer criticism of the accuracy and methodology (and the fact that it has no bearing on the current topic of the wars in the middle east), but the source itself is a sample survey that they then extrapolate on to generate a number. It does not provide any distinction between collateral damage and combatant deaths, it does not make a distinction for civil violence, it does nothing more than provide a VERY rough ESTIMATE of total deaths, that isn't even based on a majority of reported deaths, but on a survey with a small sample size. There are a lot of assumptions involved in generating these (irrelevant to the current topic) numbers.

Next you complain about the use of depleted uranium, which presents little appreciable danger over lead, and also ignore the fact that if you are hit with this ammunition you have far larger issues than the trivial amount of residual radioactivity. The smallest munition depleted uranium is typically used in is the 30mm rounds for the GAU-8 Avenger (AKA: that huge fucking cannon the A-10C is built around); there's not going to be much left of you if you get hit with one of these, but it's normally used in a combat mix (4 depleted uranium armour-piercing incendiary round to 1 high explosive incendiary round) against armour. Against an infantry target you normally use straight HEI for greater lethality, but even the API would result in a recreation of that scene in the movie "The Jackal" with the .50-cal. And before you complain about residual radioactivity of munition in the environment or threat to those handling it or treating those hit with it, it's wroth noting that a simple tshirt is sufficient to block the radiation from depleted uranium. http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/ac/equip/gau-8.htm (see also the wikipedia article on depleted uranium).

PietjePuk75 wrote:

Titanium Dragon wrote:

And yet, America is the world's oldest democracy.

This statement clearly shows your view of the world and is not hindered by any facts :-(

We all knew that about him already; it's why most of the regulars on Ars have him blocked.

atu30004 wrote:

Good!

Exactly what Mark Shuttleworth needed: someone who would take over Ubuntu and fix everything which is wrong with it. Starting with the leadership.

Really they just need to fuck off with Unity and its single biggest problem will be gone. No issues over on the Kubuntu side

The only arguable contender there is the UK or Iceland, but both are rather questionable; Iceland's parliament existed a very long time ago, but hasn't been continuous nor has it continously ruled the island, and when the UK became a democracy is debatable due to the gradual evolution of their system - there was no clear mark where it became a democracy all of a sudden, and really it probably didn't truly count until the 20th century when the House of Lords lost its veto power and it became a representative democracy.

Some going for obscurity points might argue San Marino, but it wasn't actually a representative democracy prior to 1906.

So I mean, one could argue about it, but it is at least a legitimate claimant to the title.

nothing more wrong than a quasi-dictatorship with a penchant for invasion, civilian slaughter and illegal detension. (I'm talking about USA if you can't figure that one out).

sporkwitch wrote:

The wikipedia numbers cite "deaths by violence" (read: not directly attributed to an american bullet fired by an american gun, in american hands), and combined figures. Nothing there references any distinction, and so is not useful in proving your argument. How many were military VS civilian? How many were killed indiscriminately vs being too close to a particular strike? The numbers aren't useful in drawing any conclusions here.

I agree that conflating the various direct causes of death (direct military action against belligerents, direct civilian casualties from military action, communal violence, and indirect death from damaged infrastructure, amongst others) and mixing that up with hyperbole about 'slaughter' is not helpful.

"Penchant for...civilian slaughter", especially suggests that all the slaughter was done by the accused party.

Whatever the semantics, people who are often inclined to see the US (and other active military powers such as UK, France, Russia) as the responsible party, and therefore the proximate cause of all the deaths. Indeed, US military policy seems to be based on the two principles of moral authority (because we're a democracy, we must be, you know, right) and overwhelming superiority (they used to call this full spectrum dominance), so people often think that each war fought, far from being a last resort, is in fact fought out of choice and very much on the terms of the US's choosing, and often for the geopolitical strategic reasons of maintaining US hegemony, or securing economic concerns, and ultimately maintaining the wealth of folks back home.

You have to weigh that view against a self defence or national security argument. This isn't helped when politicians conflate 'national security' with access to resources, which while possibly necessary in maintaining the economy, really just comes down to protecting national wealth.

So, in law they use the 'but for' test in determining proximate cause. For example, would all those Vietnamese and Iraqi people be dead 'but for' the US action in those countries? If not, then the US was the cause. And if so, beyond simple negligence, was it reasonable to expect that the US 'should have known' that it would cause all those deaths?

Obviously nobody can rewind history and check what would have happened if the US hadn't of acted.

nothing more wrong than a quasi-dictatorship with a penchant for invasion, civilian slaughter and illegal detension. (I'm talking about USA if you can't figure that one out).

sporkwitch wrote:

The wikipedia numbers cite "deaths by violence" (read: not directly attributed to an american bullet fired by an american gun, in american hands), and combined figures. Nothing there references any distinction, and so is not useful in proving your argument. How many were military VS civilian? How many were killed indiscriminately vs being too close to a particular strike? The numbers aren't useful in drawing any conclusions here.

I agree that conflating the various direct causes of death (direct military action against belligerents, direct civilian casualties from military action, communal violence, and indirect death from damaged infrastructure, amongst others) and mixing that up with hyperbole about 'slaughter' is not helpful.

"Penchant for...civilian slaughter", especially suggests that all the slaughter was done by the accused party.

Whatever the semantics, people who are often inclined to see the US (and other active military powers such as UK, France, Russia) as the responsible party, and therefore the proximate cause of all the deaths. Indeed, US military policy seems to be based on the two principles of moral authority (because we're a democracy, we must be, you know, right) and overwhelming superiority (they used to call this full spectrum dominance), so people often think that each war fought, far from being a last resort, is in fact fought out of choice and very much on the terms of the US's choosing, and often for the geopolitical strategic reasons of maintaining US hegemony, or securing economic concerns, and ultimately maintaining the wealth of folks back home.

You have to weigh that view against a self defence or national security argument. This isn't helped when politicians conflate 'national security' with access to resources, which while possibly necessary in maintaining the economy, really just comes down to protecting national wealth.

So, in law they use the 'but for' test in determining proximate cause. For example, would all those Vietnamese and Iraqi people be dead 'but for' the US action in those countries? If not, then the US was the cause. And if so, beyond simple negligence, was it reasonable to expect that the US 'should have known' that it would cause all those deaths?

Obviously nobody can rewind history and check what would have happened if the US hadn't of acted.

The thing is, the widespread, indiscriminate slaughter alleged against the US is in direct violation of policy and LOAC. Proportionality is a major component of LOAC; you don't use saturation bombing to take out a SAM site, you don't use a single squad of infantry to take out a tank collumn, you apply the amount of force required to neutralize the threat while minimizing risk to your forces and collateral damage. This is a goal not just for humanitarian reasons but the dirty yet more-tangible reason of COST. The point is, it makes no sense in terms of strategy or public relations to do what the US is accused of doing.

As to resources, that very much can be and is a national security issue. Dependence on a non-ally, especially one openly hostile if not militarily, is absolutely a national security issue. China's ability to single-handedly gut what's left of the western economies and the US in particular is ALSO a national security issue. That said, this is a reason to fix the economy locally, and wean ourselves off foreign resources, not to annex those sovereign states to take control of those resources. It is a legitimate statement that access to resources is a national security issue, though. Hell, Iran's lack of decent uranium deposits is a national security issue for that country in their minds, since it means they can't get the one thing that can protect you from the US: nuclear deterrents.

The thing is, the widespread, indiscriminate slaughter alleged against the US is in direct violation of policy and LOAC. Proportionality is a major component of LOAC; you don't use saturation bombing to take out a SAM site, you don't use a single squad of infantry to take out a tank collumn, you apply the amount of force required to neutralize the threat while minimizing risk to your forces and collateral damage. This is a goal not just for humanitarian reasons but the dirty yet more-tangible reason of COST. The point is, it makes no sense in terms of strategy or public relations to do what the US is accused of doing.

As to resources, that very much can be and is a national security issue. Dependence on a non-ally, especially one openly hostile if not militarily, is absolutely a national security issue. China's ability to single-handedly gut what's left of the western economies and the US in particular is ALSO a national security issue. That said, this is a reason to fix the economy locally, and wean ourselves off foreign resources, not to annex those sovereign states to take control of those resources. It is a legitimate statement that access to resources is a national security issue, though. Hell, Iran's lack of decent uranium deposits is a national security issue for that country in their minds, since it means they can't get the one thing that can protect you from the US: nuclear deterrents.

Well, I'll leave it to the conspiracy nuts to argue that the Iraq war was prosecuted with some sort of profit motive, or even any regard to the financial cost at the political level. I think the relatively sanguine (Western) public response to the Lancet's (peer reviewed) study showing something in the order to 650,000 'excess deaths' suggests that the public relations cost isn't so high either. Sure, there's been a change of controlling party and a policy shift in the fall out, but not to a great degree, and calls for criminal prosecution against those in charge at the time are still fringe/crazy opinions.

I am not one of those accusing the US of widespread, indiscriminate slaughter. If the troops on the ground behave in anyway that you might not expect, then it's my impression that they act with more restraint and compassion than you might reasonably imagine.

But they are still soldiers, not policemen or firemen. Their job description involves killing people and being a bit aggressive, even if the personality spec requires restraint and good judgement. Add to that many are often quite young and don't have a great deal of 'life experience'.

The intentions and performance of the armed forces may be exemplary, but they are a blunt tool. I think that most of critics of US foreign policy - not the conspiracy nut jobs - have a problem with the politicians who deploy those armed forces, often in the face of the advice of the top brass, or pick and choose the intelligence which seems to give the answer they are looking for.

As to 'national security'. To be honest, it has the ring of Orwellian New Speak to me. Self defence is all very well, if someone's shooting at you it's pretty easy to justify shooting back, to a proportional degree. But you can roll anything into national security: We have a big army, it costs a lot of money, which is funded through taxes, so we need a big economy to pay for it, therefore a big economy is a national security issue QED.

If you allow such logic to be used to justify your actions in international dialogue, then you are right, it opens the doors to Iran doing all sorts to get nukes as a deterrence to both the US and Israel.

I'm going to invoke Godwin's Law here just for the hell of it: the logic of national security justifies WWII Nazi expansion. They went into Danzig, East Prussia and the Sudetenland to protect the majority German populations there, they annexed Poland to protect Danzig and East Prussia, they annexed Czech to protect the Sudetenland, they went East for living space, they headed to the Caucuses for the oil, which they absolutely needed for their army after everyone started declaring war on them.

Back on topic(ish), China calls the years between roughly 1840 and 1950 'The Century of Humiliation', starting with the Opium Wars, which the British waged because of a huge trade imbalance in the name of 'national security'. Before this, China was a vast, prosperous, stable civilisation state, with pretty much the whole of SE Asia in a tributary relationship with it. The Chinese term for China is still literally 'the centre of the world', or the more commonly translated 'middle kingdom'.

China still sees itself as the worlds greatest civilisation, with a 5,000 year history and an unsurpassed history of culture, art and technology. They very much see themselves as superior to all other cultures, with their recent success validating the view that the last 5 percent of their history only being a temporary blip, and they fully expect to regain their rightful place as the dominant global culture within the next 50 - 100 years.

They are playing the long game with a plan that stretches decades. They started the 'reform period' in the mid-70's, and seem quite happy to just defer indefinitely (although not concede) many 'national security' issues such as territorial sovereignty over Taiwan and disputed islands in the South China Sea.

One day in the next few decades they will feel strong enough to start acting hegemonically. I wonder what they will get up to under the well established doctrine of 'national security' then? I hope they live up to their rhetoric of being the cultural successors of Zheng He, the 14th century explorer who got as far as Africa, and instead of colonizing it like a Westerner would, just came home again, pleased with a great bit of exploring but not really bothered about exploiting it.

Lastly if you actually been to the developed cities in China, one would probably be saying, damn this makes New York City look like a backwater town and the locals that you interact with, you'd be hard press to find a real communist there, frankly China is more capitalistic these days than New Yorkers are.

Lastly if you actually been to the developed cities in China, one would probably be saying, damn this makes New York City look like a backwater town and the locals that you interact with, you'd be hard press to find a real communist there, frankly China is more capitalistic these days than New Yorkers are.

Have you been to lower Manhattan in the Financial District lately?...

Are you talking the giant glass skyscrapers, or the rampant free market entrepreneurism right up in your face, everywhere you go?

Or maybe the degree of market regulation, but I guess that's not so easy to see as you wonder round the streets.

The thing is, the widespread, indiscriminate slaughter alleged against the US is in direct violation of policy and LOAC. Proportionality is a major component of LOAC; you don't use saturation bombing to take out a SAM site, you don't use a single squad of infantry to take out a tank collumn, you apply the amount of force required to neutralize the threat while minimizing risk to your forces and collateral damage. This is a goal not just for humanitarian reasons but the dirty yet more-tangible reason of COST. The point is, it makes no sense in terms of strategy or public relations to do what the US is accused of doing.

I notice that you've 249 posts to your credit, and you've been a member since mid-2009. You are, obviously, someone with a life, unlike most of the commenters here. I also notice that YOUR comment had received eleven down-votes. "We'll show YOU who's the smartest!"

Keep one fact in mind before you decide to waste precious time commenting on anything Ars publishes: any comment you make is like, as has been said, "...casting pearls before swine..."

As to 'national security'. To be honest, it has the ring of Orwellian New Speak to me. Self defence is all very well, if someone's shooting at you it's pretty easy to justify shooting back, to a proportional degree. But you can roll anything into national security: We have a big army, it costs a lot of money, which is funded through taxes, so we need a big economy to pay for it, therefore a big economy is a national security issue QED.

That something can be used to make an argument doesn't automatically make that argument legitimate. Yes, you could arguably attempt such circular logic to reach whatever conclusion you want and attempt to justify aggressive action that way, but doing so is disingenuous. Resources are absolutely a nation security concern, particularly when we're talking about dependence on foreign resources; the ability for another entity to cut you off from something you need is the definition of a national security concern.

As I pointed out, however, that doesn't in itself justify invasion. It indicates a threat to national security, it does not determine the solution. One solution that I already pointed out is research into alternative energy (hydrogen fuel cells, nuclear power -- modern breeder reactors are ridiculously efficient -- and electric vehicles, to name a few). Fixing a threat to national security doesn't necessarily mean taking from someone else or starting a war, it just means figuring out the issue and finding a solution. There are non-violent solutions to the issue of America's resource problems.

This applies too to your example of the size of the US's standing military. What you said is true, but that doesn't make it less meaningful: a strong economy is absolutely a national security concern, look no further than a failing economy being what killed the USSR. Again we return to the issue of finding the solution, since the problem itself doesn't determine that there only be one possible one. One way we can relieve the issue in your example is by reducing the size of the military (something that's been going on for a while now; in the Air Force we call it "force shaping," but what it really means is that they lump a bunch of career fields together so that now you're responsible for a million more things that you've never been trained on, and now the career field is overmanned, so they start forcing people out leaving fewer people to get the job done; if you hadn't guessed I don't have a high opinion of HOW they handle the force shaping.) Another option might be fixing how the military budgets money (currently if you don't spend all of your annual budget you lose what's left at the end of the year and get less money the next year, which encourages wasteful spending at the end of the fiscal year to ensure you have money next year, so that if something breaks you won't be left without money to replace it; we bought a couple flat screen TVs one year to help kill off the remainder of our budget, for "status displays.")

grog|e wrote:

sporkwitch wrote:

The thing is, the widespread, indiscriminate slaughter alleged against the US is in direct violation of policy and LOAC. Proportionality is a major component of LOAC; you don't use saturation bombing to take out a SAM site, you don't use a single squad of infantry to take out a tank collumn, you apply the amount of force required to neutralize the threat while minimizing risk to your forces and collateral damage. This is a goal not just for humanitarian reasons but the dirty yet more-tangible reason of COST. The point is, it makes no sense in terms of strategy or public relations to do what the US is accused of doing.

To address your question, no, I don't trust that site, because they've a history of strong bias, fudging facts, and reporting of outright falsehoods (I particularly liked the baseless child abuse allegations that caused the cessation of their content being posted to the BBC). The icing on the cake is probably the 9/11 "Truther" on their staff.

That said, per the first link you give, "other" refers to ALL alleged combatants, and the real "other" category that is lumped into it. Now if we assume the numbers given are accurate (debatable, given the dearth of census-type information, let alone reliable census-type information), and we properly label the fields:

Now the table looks a lot more realistic. The numbers provided intentionally spin it so that, and are predicated on the assumption that, "alleged combatant" has the same connotation as "conspiracy theory" (that is to say, when read it's assumed to not be true). If anything, these numbers bear out my own statements and research: that no one is really sure of real numbers. Saying no civilians have been harmed is obviously bogus (though I do question if it's even as high as your numbers claim, given the "evidence" and "sources" I've seen TBIJ use largely consist of anecdote and circumstantial "evidence" with nothing to link anything to anything else), but to assume, as their numbers intentionally imply, that a majority of those 2348 "alleged combatants" were not, in fact, combatants, is equally absurd. Missiles aren't launched on a whim; if one was launched, it's because whatever it was launched at was doing something threatening, or was armed enough to appear to be a threat.

US rules of engagement in Iraq, for example, are so absurdly strict that it wasn't even permitted to open fire when you are watching them set up a mortar tube and point it at the base while flipping you the bird; one of my best buddies was listening on the radio while the reports were going through from the tower. Does that sound like guidance that would result in indiscriminately shooting anything that moves, the implication from saying that all those "alleged combatants" were just "other" and no one really had any good idea, just deciding to shoot first and ask questions never?

That's the problem, especially for me being IN the military and KNOWING our rules of engagement, how we're trained, the laws of armed combat, the UCMJ, and the list goes on. Do accidents happen? Yes. But the allegations against the US are impossible to be true of accidents, and require complete sociopathic indifference, bordering on outright malicious intent. This flies in the face of everything I know, and as I pointed out earlier, makes no political, public relations, or financial sense (as callous as that sounds); there has to be something to gain, there has to be motive, and there simply hasn't been any. Doing what it's accused of is actively DETRIMENTAL to the goals of the US, as has been seen by how much noise these sensationalist reports generate, regardless of the questionable nature of their sources and conclusions.

Lastly if you actually been to the developed cities in China, one would probably be saying, damn this makes New York City look like a backwater town and the locals that you interact with, you'd be hard press to find a real communist there, frankly China is more capitalistic these days than New Yorkers are.

Have you been to lower Manhattan in the Financial District lately?...

A quote has been attributed to me that I did not write. Somebody screwed up.

That something can be used to make an argument doesn't automatically make that argument legitimate. Yes, you could arguably attempt such circular logic to reach whatever conclusion you want and attempt to justify aggressive action that way, but doing so is disingenuous. Resources are absolutely a nation security concern, particularly when we're talking about dependence on foreign resources; the ability for another entity to cut you off from something you need is the definition of a national security concern.

Your point is well made.

sporkwitch wrote:

To address your question, no, I don't trust that site, because they've a history of strong bias, fudging facts, and reporting of outright falsehoods (I particularly liked the baseless child abuse allegations that caused the cessation of their content being posted to the BBC). The icing on the cake is probably the 9/11 "Truther" on their staff.

Well their site looked hysterical to me, which is why I included the caveat, but a cursory glance at the references made me think the numbers were at least roughly plausible.

I don't know how to interpret the 'others' category - I remember hearing somewhere that all adult males get excluded from 'civilian' - but I read the numbers as at least 20 percent civilian, likely 20+ percent women and children.

I know these numbers are a bit of a distraction, I just saw it posted and thought it apposite. But it more or less confirms my prejudice. I don't know how to characterise it, maybe you can help me there, but it's not 'war' with a well defined army to target. It seems like the people in tribal Pakistan are doing just what I'd imagine: many males old enough to carry a gun have joined a militia. Do you call those people soldiers, or civilians? Terrorists or patriots? So when you wage drone warfare on them, you're going to kill people who maybe you don't really want to. All round it's just what anyone would expect, and I imagine the military planners could foresee this and advised their political masters of it, but maybe I'm wrong.

And the raw numbers are less than 3000 total. So as glib as this may sound, maybe that's trivial in a country of 175 million if it is actually doing any good, or even if it has a fair chance of doing some good.

So it comes down once again to a judgement on the politicians who authorise these actions, not the armed forces. You are obviously sensitive to the cranks who see every engagement as a My Lai massacre, but I think that's just a very loud, very small group of people who should probably smoke less weed and get out more.

I'll try to bring this back to china again in terms of national security and the question of 'universality' of Western values.

I know it's easy to find blame in China's political system - 20th century democides go Mao, Stalin, Hitler, in that order - but since Mao died I don't think you can accuse them of being ruled by mad men. As another poster suggested, stability is very important to economic growth and the general functioning of society. China has been obsessed with stability and social cohesion long before the Communist era, the concept of balance and harmony are key principles in Confucian philosophy. This informs the Chinese view of dissent and protest.

And I would argue that there is a similar view in the West, a fear of anarchy which is often - to some degree at least - violently suppressed by the state security forces (I mean the police).

But the West has a deep tradition of individual liberty: free speech, rule by law not executive, popular sovereignty, and maybe most fundamental, freedom of concious and religion. This last point is important, as it's largely down to the reformation battles over freedom to follow your own religious beliefs versus those imposed by the state that really define the Western, or at least Anglo-Saxon - view of liberty.

And I'm a great fan of dissent and free expression. It's my impression that most people are generally in favour of the most horribly oppressive things, and if there weren't a group of annoying libertarians constantly popping up saying 'you can't ban that', democracy wouldn't be so great.

These values - free speech, dissent, individualism - appear fundamental and universal to us. But clearly they are not, as the extrajudicial killings of the drone programme demonstrate. Okay, so they may be justified, they may even to legal, but the principles of innocent until proven guilty, right to trial, open justice, judicial oversight etc are conspicuous by their absence.

To be clear, my purpose here is not to argue for or against the principles of Western liberal democracy, I'm just trying to point out that they are not universally accepted. The Chinese political establishment may well have the good of the Chinese people as their primary motivation. They may well see their suppression of a tiny minority of dissenters as clearly the right thing to do. In fact, they may all be really nice people, at least as much as any politicians are.

But In China, filial piety trumps individual liberty: the good of the family is above of the good of the child. And the Chinese don't subscribe to the Western concept of the state being an impediment to freedom, a necessary evil with a social contract. Instead it's more like an extension of the family, or maybe something like the Catholic relationship with Mother Church, only not really, although the Confucian concept of the legitimacy of the government is based on the Mandate of Heaven, just 'heaven' means something different there.

The other thing to watch out for is China's willingness to experiment and compete internally. This was well under way in the Communist-proper era: different provinces ran different systems of collectivising the farms, building up industry etc, and the best practise was adopted by the less well performing states, where appropriate. Something similar is happening - in fact has been for a long time - with political reform. (Another thing to notice is that the Chinese political system has never really stood still, it's been in a constant state of 'progress' since 1949.) Again, Westerners tend to see the Westphalian model of the nation state as universal. People widely expected China to just absorbe Hong Kong into greater China when they took over in '97. The Chinese concept of 'One Country, Two Systems' is alien to the Western mindset, but it makes perfect sense to them. Hong Kong is democratic (ish), at least more now than under the British. If this appears stable, and above all beneficial to society, you might see something similar being rolled out in Shanghai, Beijing or Chongqing in the next 10 - 15 years. But don't expect China to 'go democratic' all at once. It may be a long time before the outer provinces get full representation, a bit like Puerto Rico, Guam etc now

I think you missed what I was replying to, which was the notion that SSH (and, presumably, I dunno, openvpn? other stuff?) was somehow so magically baked into Linux that it would "always be there" no matter what an entity trying to build a distro might do.

Not baked in, just extremely core (and why you would disable SSH on a SERVER is beyond me; how do you expect to administer it? Are you seriously planning to have a monitor and keyboard hooked up to the thing?). Even if it's not included, it would be effectively impossible to prevent installing it, unless they plan to prevent admin permissions for anyone but the government, which again wouldn't work, because it's impossible to completely secure a machine against someone with physical access to it. Going with linux definitely makes it much easier to get access to the tools needed to bypass the Great Firewall, and it's extremely unlikely they'd even bother trying to remove them from the stock distro; they're simply too important, and too commonly used.

You are really, really amazingly off base here. SSH is just a binary, whether you're talking about the server or the client. There is, seriously, no difference whatsoever between uninstalling /usr/bin/ssh or /usr/sbin/sshd and uninstalling PuTTY on the Windows side... and you face precisely the same challenges in keeping a userbase from deliberately installing similar binaries themselves after the fact.

Linux. Is not. Magic. It's free because we keep it free, not because there's something magical inside that makes it always be free no matter who distributes it. Now, assuming the PRC does in fact adhere to the GPL and publishes source on any modifications they make, that does make it easier to see what they're doing... but that's pretty much irrelevant as to whether it's easy to install - or uninstall - or attempt to prevent installation of - binaries like ssh in whatever form.

Note: I say this as somebody whose house is packed chock *full* of Linux - no Windows PCs at all in my house - and who makes a living about equally split between supporting Linux and supporting Windows.

It would be stupid and a waste of resources to try to build an OS from scratch, rather than to build on top of one that already works extremely well and has a robust ecosystem of software, services, and support already in place. Starting from scratch would not only take longer, but you'd have to develop brand new software for it; by going with Ubuntu and Linux as a base, you have a pre-made ecosystem of everything out there for linux, including the .deb package format that Ubuntu has helped solidify as very nearly becoming the de facto standard.

This is true. Probably also worth noting: the fact that the PRC is starting with Linux is a hopeful sign of good intent: they either have to publish the source for all of their modifications (thus both contributing to the ecosystem and making it clear to everyone what those modifications do) or, well, fail to publish... in which case we all know what's up.

They could have started with a *BSD which would have given them access to almost all of the same applications, with no requirement to publish source at all. (OS X Kylin?)

Regarding casualty numbers, the flash graphics in your initial link state explicitly that "other" includes "alleged combatants," which is why I relabeled the numbers as I did, since what "other" is left in that list? We had civilians listed, we had children listed (which are a subset of civilians that i HOPE they didn't count twice -- once as children and a second as civilian), we had high profile targets listed (which are a subset of combatants), and we had other with the statement that it includes alleged combatants. Really what they're saying that NO ONE that is alleged to be a combatant was an actual combatant, that's the only reason for stressing "alleged" and in the numbers not even listing it at all but rather putting it as "other."

Basically, if the table were the atmosphere, it'd be like listing a handful of trace gasses individually then saying "other: 98%" with other including oxygen and nitrogen. It's deliberately misleading vagueness and use of connotation to imply that anyone that wasn't famous for being a terrorist leader was just an innocent bystander.

It's also worth noting that if the total is accurate at a little over 3000 (never mind if it's less) then they're certainly ahead of the US, since we lost what, 5000 by now? 6000? Should we include the ~10k in New York City (0% of which were hostile, let alone combatants of any type)? If anything the low numbers indicate exactly why it's so hard to get good data: it's a geurilla war by nonconventional forces that blend in and mingle with the local population. An eye for an eye is not an excuse, but it's worth putting things into some kind of perspective.

Back on topic, I largely agree with your assessment of China. It'd be nice to see the same in the west again, but the powers that be are too set on REMAINING the powers that be, and fattening their wallets at everyone else's expense in the process. It's why asia in general is blazing ahead in technology and telecommunications (no exaggeration, some estimates have places like Korea and Japan as much as a decade ahead of the US).